Value of highly ranked undergrad if law school in your future

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

Don't see Wooster on those lists.

The top pre-law grad from Wooster in 2021 is going to BC Law School https://wooster.edu/2021/05/05/wooster-names-jacob-abramo-2021-carpenter-prize-winner/

The 2020 one is going to Ohio State Law School.

2019 - Univ of Minn Law School

To answer your question, it will be challenging to get into a top law school from Wooster.

Don’t you need to know their LSAT scores before you can reach that conclusion?

[Anonymous]

It doesn’t matter what end result anyone is dreaming of, final results vary immensely. You can’t base college choice on a crystal ball. Just go to the best you can afford to attend. Find what suits you, not on what’s free or what’s expensive, find right fit.

[Anonymous]

I am a lawyer. Have two kids at prestigious/ivy league undergrads. I asked two law school consultants the question about undergrad and both said does not make a difference. I have to believe a top undergrad makes a difference in a close-ish call. But it would have to be close. There just has to be value in saying we have another undergrad from Cornell versus Davidson (a really good school).

I did debate in high school and college as did my kids. Debaters nearly always got into top colleges (from high schools) and into top law schools (from colleges). The question is/was is it correlation or causation? Can't really answer. Similarly, all the ivies listed above at Yale law--is it causation or correlation? Are those folks really smart and got into Yale as a result? Or they got in partially because they are at top schools. My gut tells me generally not causation but correlation except in close calls.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

I never said it matters to law firms at all -- at law firms all that matters is the law school.

I also never said that Yale doesn't admit anyone who didn't attend a top college. I merely said it was "somewhat" of any exception. Yes, I'm aware of their published list for the last five years, but the list doesn't say how many students from each school was actually admitted and are attending. If you really have time, click on the Skadden website and read the bios of the Yale Law grads who work there. You'll see that the overwhelming majority went to elite colleges.

That list is about 180 schools. In five years, Yale had about 1000 students enroll. All this shows is that where you attend college is not a bar to entry, but without more data, it's impossible to say whether it is comparatively easier to get accepted at Yale if you're applying from certain schools rather than others. So you can't say that it doesn't matter.

Your last two sentences contradict each other, so I don't get your point. My point is that it DOES matter, at least "somewhat," at Yale. It's a small law school that is more selective than any in the country. The large majority of Yale Law students went to top colleges -- fact.

I think I probably would agree with you. You can get into Yale law from any undergraduate institution, but I think (not know) that it is easier to do some from a small group of colleges (certainly Yale undergrad). There is a difference between "can you do it" vs "how hard is it".

It's easier to do from Yale because there are way more ridiculously smart, hard-working, ambitious overachievers there than at less selective schools, not because Yale has a golden ticket they hand out to each graduate. A superstar is a superstar, regardless of where they get their education.

so, it's easier.

No, not for any one individual. My comment referred to it being natural that a place with more qualified applicants would yield more acceptances--I could have phrased that better. The same individual, though, would not have an easier time applying from Yale than from, say, Wesleyan or Connecticut College.

That’s pure speculation. All you reasonably know is that a greater percentage of the class is from Yale vs Wesleyan. Everything else is your off the cuff belief.

And your opinion is your off-he-cuff belief. I believe mine is more based in fact. It's not exactly the same thing, but take a look at Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study of lifetime income sometime. They've shown definitively that someone's earning capacity is not attributable to where they went to college. Those who don't go to a super-selective college but were of a similar caliber earn just as much as those who did attend the elite colleges. It seems likely, in my off-the-cuff opinion, that the same would apply to likelihood of success at Yale Law and that their admission team knows this.

Ha ha ha. Different poster here. Nothing that you just said is "fact." You have no idea what Yale Law admissions people think. None. Zero. But I can tell you one thing that I KNOW they think: that Yale undergrads are good bets for admission because they have a proven track record of success. And the number two school represented at Yale Law? Harvard, of course.

Starting at page 114 of the attached Yale Law School Bulletin for 2019-2020 -- the most recent one that I could find -- there's a list of schools by the numbers for the entire student body in 2018. There were 635 students enrolled in the JD program in the year.
Of those 635, here are the schools with more than five students represented in the entering class.

Yale: 90
Harvard: 59
Columbia: 34
Princeton: 31
Stanford: 22
Dartmouth: 21
Cornell: 19
Chicago: 18
Brown: 17
Penn: 16
Georgetown: 13
UC-Berkeley: 13
Duke: 10
Michigan: 8
Northwestern: 8
USC: 8
Johns Hopkins: 7
UVA: 7
Amherst: 6
Swarthmore: 6

These schools alone, all of which are considered top tier, accounted for 413 of Yale's 635 student enrolled that year.

Then you have other fine schools enrolling multiple applicants: Barnard, BC, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, William & Mary, Davidson, Emory, Haverford, Pomona, MIT, Middlebury, NYU, Rice, Notre Dame, Wash U, UCLA, Tufts, the military and naval academies, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and UNC. No slackers here, either, and these schools combined account for another 84 students.

So now you're at 497, leaving only 138 to count. Quite a few of those are from top schools as well.

Yes, maybe 1/5 of the student body at Yale Law in 2018 came from less "fancy" schools, but in most of those cases we are talking about one student represented in all three classes (not one in each class). There are exceptions, to be sure -- BYU had 5, DePaul had 3, and a few less high regarded big state schools had a couple each.

So it seems to me that the Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools, and that what you say is fact is closer to fiction.

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

Causation or Correlation? Are they just smart kids that got into Ivy and had good grades there and good LSATs to get top law schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

I never said it matters to law firms at all -- at law firms all that matters is the law school.

I also never said that Yale doesn't admit anyone who didn't attend a top college. I merely said it was "somewhat" of any exception. Yes, I'm aware of their published list for the last five years, but the list doesn't say how many students from each school was actually admitted and are attending. If you really have time, click on the Skadden website and read the bios of the Yale Law grads who work there. You'll see that the overwhelming majority went to elite colleges.

That list is about 180 schools. In five years, Yale had about 1000 students enroll. All this shows is that where you attend college is not a bar to entry, but without more data, it's impossible to say whether it is comparatively easier to get accepted at Yale if you're applying from certain schools rather than others. So you can't say that it doesn't matter.

Your last two sentences contradict each other, so I don't get your point. My point is that it DOES matter, at least "somewhat," at Yale. It's a small law school that is more selective than any in the country. The large majority of Yale Law students went to top colleges -- fact.

I think I probably would agree with you. You can get into Yale law from any undergraduate institution, but I think (not know) that it is easier to do some from a small group of colleges (certainly Yale undergrad). There is a difference between "can you do it" vs "how hard is it".

It's easier to do from Yale because there are way more ridiculously smart, hard-working, ambitious overachievers there than at less selective schools, not because Yale has a golden ticket they hand out to each graduate. A superstar is a superstar, regardless of where they get their education.

so, it's easier.

No, not for any one individual. My comment referred to it being natural that a place with more qualified applicants would yield more acceptances--I could have phrased that better. The same individual, though, would not have an easier time applying from Yale than from, say, Wesleyan or Connecticut College.

That’s pure speculation. All you reasonably know is that a greater percentage of the class is from Yale vs Wesleyan. Everything else is your off the cuff belief.

And your opinion is your off-he-cuff belief. I believe mine is more based in fact. It's not exactly the same thing, but take a look at Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study of lifetime income sometime. They've shown definitively that someone's earning capacity is not attributable to where they went to college. Those who don't go to a super-selective college but were of a similar caliber earn just as much as those who did attend the elite colleges. It seems likely, in my off-the-cuff opinion, that the same would apply to likelihood of success at Yale Law and that their admission team knows this.

Ha ha ha. Different poster here. Nothing that you just said is "fact." You have no idea what Yale Law admissions people think. None. Zero. But I can tell you one thing that I KNOW they think: that Yale undergrads are good bets for admission because they have a proven track record of success. And the number two school represented at Yale Law? Harvard, of course.

Starting at page 114 of the attached Yale Law School Bulletin for 2019-2020 -- the most recent one that I could find -- there's a list of schools by the numbers for the entire student body in 2018. There were 635 students enrolled in the JD program in the year.
Of those 635, here are the schools with more than five students represented in the entering class.

Yale: 90
Harvard: 59
Columbia: 34
Princeton: 31
Stanford: 22
Dartmouth: 21
Cornell: 19
Chicago: 18
Brown: 17
Penn: 16
Georgetown: 13
UC-Berkeley: 13
Duke: 10
Michigan: 8
Northwestern: 8
USC: 8
Johns Hopkins: 7
UVA: 7
Amherst: 6
Swarthmore: 6

These schools alone, all of which are considered top tier, accounted for 413 of Yale's 635 student enrolled that year.

Then you have other fine schools enrolling multiple applicants: Barnard, BC, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, William & Mary, Davidson, Emory, Haverford, Pomona, MIT, Middlebury, NYU, Rice, Notre Dame, Wash U, UCLA, Tufts, the military and naval academies, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and UNC. No slackers here, either, and these schools combined account for another 84 students.

So now you're at 497, leaving only 138 to count. Quite a few of those are from top schools as well.

Yes, maybe 1/5 of the student body at Yale Law in 2018 came from less "fancy" schools, but in most of those cases we are talking about one student represented in all three classes (not one in each class). There are exceptions, to be sure -- BYU had 5, DePaul had 3, and a few less high regarded big state schools had a couple each.

So it seems to me that the Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools, and that what you say is fact is closer to fiction.

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

You just spent a lot of time not responding to what I said. "The Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools", as you say, because there are a ridiculously higher number of qualified applicants at those highly regarded schools, not because those schools are highly regarded.

[Anonymous]

Maybe leave Yale Law School out of this discussion? Because at YLS, unlike anywhere else, the admissions decisions are made by faculty who review and score files and are believed to have some bias in favor of “prestigious” undergraduate schools

Also since nobody* gets into YLS the focus is better placed on every other law school in the country, where GPA and LSAT are pretty much all that matter

* Yale accepted 16 applicants straight out of undergrad last year, so if getting in there is your goal, you should spend way more time thinking about what interesting work you’re going to do after college instead of where you’re going to go

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To my knowledge Law is the only profession where even 20 years out, one lawyer will ask another - where did you go to school? And they mean both undergrad and law. And I guess, hearing from legal friends, being able to say Cornell Yale is more prestigious than saying Wooster Yale.

I'm a lawyer of this vintage and this is just not true. No one asks!

Funny. People always check lawyers (and doctor's) before they are hired. They always show up on Google search. Only a no-named school grad insists they don't matter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

I never said it matters to law firms at all -- at law firms all that matters is the law school.

I also never said that Yale doesn't admit anyone who didn't attend a top college. I merely said it was "somewhat" of any exception. Yes, I'm aware of their published list for the last five years, but the list doesn't say how many students from each school was actually admitted and are attending. If you really have time, click on the Skadden website and read the bios of the Yale Law grads who work there. You'll see that the overwhelming majority went to elite colleges.

That list is about 180 schools. In five years, Yale had about 1000 students enroll. All this shows is that where you attend college is not a bar to entry, but without more data, it's impossible to say whether it is comparatively easier to get accepted at Yale if you're applying from certain schools rather than others. So you can't say that it doesn't matter.

Your last two sentences contradict each other, so I don't get your point. My point is that it DOES matter, at least "somewhat," at Yale. It's a small law school that is more selective than any in the country. The large majority of Yale Law students went to top colleges -- fact.

I think I probably would agree with you. You can get into Yale law from any undergraduate institution, but I think (not know) that it is easier to do some from a small group of colleges (certainly Yale undergrad). There is a difference between "can you do it" vs "how hard is it".

It's easier to do from Yale because there are way more ridiculously smart, hard-working, ambitious overachievers there than at less selective schools, not because Yale has a golden ticket they hand out to each graduate. A superstar is a superstar, regardless of where they get their education.

so, it's easier.

No, not for any one individual. My comment referred to it being natural that a place with more qualified applicants would yield more acceptances--I could have phrased that better. The same individual, though, would not have an easier time applying from Yale than from, say, Wesleyan or Connecticut College.

That’s pure speculation. All you reasonably know is that a greater percentage of the class is from Yale vs Wesleyan. Everything else is your off the cuff belief.

And your opinion is your off-he-cuff belief. I believe mine is more based in fact. It's not exactly the same thing, but take a look at Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study of lifetime income sometime. They've shown definitively that someone's earning capacity is not attributable to where they went to college. Those who don't go to a super-selective college but were of a similar caliber earn just as much as those who did attend the elite colleges. It seems likely, in my off-the-cuff opinion, that the same would apply to likelihood of success at Yale Law and that their admission team knows this.

Ha ha ha. Different poster here. Nothing that you just said is "fact." You have no idea what Yale Law admissions people think. None. Zero. But I can tell you one thing that I KNOW they think: that Yale undergrads are good bets for admission because they have a proven track record of success. And the number two school represented at Yale Law? Harvard, of course.

Starting at page 114 of the attached Yale Law School Bulletin for 2019-2020 -- the most recent one that I could find -- there's a list of schools by the numbers for the entire student body in 2018. There were 635 students enrolled in the JD program in the year.
Of those 635, here are the schools with more than five students represented in the entering class.

Yale: 90
Harvard: 59
Columbia: 34
Princeton: 31
Stanford: 22
Dartmouth: 21
Cornell: 19
Chicago: 18
Brown: 17
Penn: 16
Georgetown: 13
UC-Berkeley: 13
Duke: 10
Michigan: 8
Northwestern: 8
USC: 8
Johns Hopkins: 7
UVA: 7
Amherst: 6
Swarthmore: 6

These schools alone, all of which are considered top tier, accounted for 413 of Yale's 635 student enrolled that year.

Then you have other fine schools enrolling multiple applicants: Barnard, BC, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, William & Mary, Davidson, Emory, Haverford, Pomona, MIT, Middlebury, NYU, Rice, Notre Dame, Wash U, UCLA, Tufts, the military and naval academies, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and UNC. No slackers here, either, and these schools combined account for another 84 students.

So now you're at 497, leaving only 138 to count. Quite a few of those are from top schools as well.

Yes, maybe 1/5 of the student body at Yale Law in 2018 came from less "fancy" schools, but in most of those cases we are talking about one student represented in all three classes (not one in each class). There are exceptions, to be sure -- BYU had 5, DePaul had 3, and a few less high regarded big state schools had a couple each.

So it seems to me that the Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools, and that what you say is fact is closer to fiction.

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

You just spent a lot of time not responding to what I said. "The Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools", as you say, because there are a ridiculously higher number of qualified applicants at those highly regarded schools, not because those schools are highly regarded.

That’s a theory not a fact

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To my knowledge Law is the only profession where even 20 years out, one lawyer will ask another - where did you go to school? And they mean both undergrad and law. And I guess, hearing from legal friends, being able to say Cornell Yale is more prestigious than saying Wooster Yale.

I'm a lawyer of this vintage and this is just not true. No one asks!

Funny. People always check lawyers (and doctor's) before they are hired. They always show up on Google search. Only a no-named school grad insists they don't matter.

Different PP. Law school matters. Undergrad does. not. matter. for law, as the attorneys in this thread have explained. I don't know why that's so hard for nonlawyers to believe.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To my knowledge Law is the only profession where even 20 years out, one lawyer will ask another - where did you go to school? And they mean both undergrad and law. And I guess, hearing from legal friends, being able to say Cornell Yale is more prestigious than saying Wooster Yale.

I'm a lawyer of this vintage and this is just not true. No one asks!

Funny. People always check lawyers (and doctor's) before they are hired. They always show up on Google search. Only a no-named school grad insists they don't matter.

Different PP. Law school matters. Undergrad does. not. matter. for law, as the attorneys in this thread have explained. I don't know why that's so hard for nonlawyers to believe.

Lol, all the free legal advice you see on here are worth what you pay for. They are free for reason. Everyone's law school and undergrad school is visible because there's demand for those info. Undergrad matters Yale and YLW or Yale and Yale Med school is different from the University of Phoenix and Western School of Law or the University of Phoenix and the U of Guadalupe Med school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Nice PR - or PC - work there.

You are going to have to explain why the SCOTUS justices don't come out of mediocre schools.

Clarence Thomas went to Holy Cross. Not mediocre, but not top tier either. Amy Coney Barrett went to Rhodes. In any event, it's only a recent thing where all of the justices went to fancy schools (even if you want to call Notre Dame fancy). In the 20th and 21st Centuries, one-third of Supreme Court justices did not attend top 25 law schools. Warren Burger, who Nixon selected as Chiel Justice and who served on the Court until 1986, went to the William Mitchell College of Law. Thurgood Marshall went to Howard. Lewis Powell went to Washington & Lee.

Next question?

All of the above bolds are private schools. None of your examples shows a mediocre school producing anything of value, i.e., the University of Dayton, the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Guam, UMBC...

The University of Dayton is private. Dufus. But yea, you're right -- there are no Supreme Court justices who attended colleges in territories outside the 50 states. So if you're from, say, Guam, you're unlikely to get a Supreme Court appointment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

I never said it matters to law firms at all -- at law firms all that matters is the law school.

I also never said that Yale doesn't admit anyone who didn't attend a top college. I merely said it was "somewhat" of any exception. Yes, I'm aware of their published list for the last five years, but the list doesn't say how many students from each school was actually admitted and are attending. If you really have time, click on the Skadden website and read the bios of the Yale Law grads who work there. You'll see that the overwhelming majority went to elite colleges.

That list is about 180 schools. In five years, Yale had about 1000 students enroll. All this shows is that where you attend college is not a bar to entry, but without more data, it's impossible to say whether it is comparatively easier to get accepted at Yale if you're applying from certain schools rather than others. So you can't say that it doesn't matter.

Your last two sentences contradict each other, so I don't get your point. My point is that it DOES matter, at least "somewhat," at Yale. It's a small law school that is more selective than any in the country. The large majority of Yale Law students went to top colleges -- fact.

I think I probably would agree with you. You can get into Yale law from any undergraduate institution, but I think (not know) that it is easier to do some from a small group of colleges (certainly Yale undergrad). There is a difference between "can you do it" vs "how hard is it".

It's easier to do from Yale because there are way more ridiculously smart, hard-working, ambitious overachievers there than at less selective schools, not because Yale has a golden ticket they hand out to each graduate. A superstar is a superstar, regardless of where they get their education.

so, it's easier.

No, not for any one individual. My comment referred to it being natural that a place with more qualified applicants would yield more acceptances--I could have phrased that better. The same individual, though, would not have an easier time applying from Yale than from, say, Wesleyan or Connecticut College.

That’s pure speculation. All you reasonably know is that a greater percentage of the class is from Yale vs Wesleyan. Everything else is your off the cuff belief.

And your opinion is your off-he-cuff belief. I believe mine is more based in fact. It's not exactly the same thing, but take a look at Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study of lifetime income sometime. They've shown definitively that someone's earning capacity is not attributable to where they went to college. Those who don't go to a super-selective college but were of a similar caliber earn just as much as those who did attend the elite colleges. It seems likely, in my off-the-cuff opinion, that the same would apply to likelihood of success at Yale Law and that their admission team knows this.

Ha ha ha. Different poster here. Nothing that you just said is "fact." You have no idea what Yale Law admissions people think. None. Zero. But I can tell you one thing that I KNOW they think: that Yale undergrads are good bets for admission because they have a proven track record of success. And the number two school represented at Yale Law? Harvard, of course.

Starting at page 114 of the attached Yale Law School Bulletin for 2019-2020 -- the most recent one that I could find -- there's a list of schools by the numbers for the entire student body in 2018. There were 635 students enrolled in the JD program in the year.
Of those 635, here are the schools with more than five students represented in the entering class.

Yale: 90
Harvard: 59
Columbia: 34
Princeton: 31
Stanford: 22
Dartmouth: 21
Cornell: 19
Chicago: 18
Brown: 17
Penn: 16
Georgetown: 13
UC-Berkeley: 13
Duke: 10
Michigan: 8
Northwestern: 8
USC: 8
Johns Hopkins: 7
UVA: 7
Amherst: 6
Swarthmore: 6

These schools alone, all of which are considered top tier, accounted for 413 of Yale's 635 student enrolled that year.

Then you have other fine schools enrolling multiple applicants: Barnard, BC, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, William & Mary, Davidson, Emory, Haverford, Pomona, MIT, Middlebury, NYU, Rice, Notre Dame, Wash U, UCLA, Tufts, the military and naval academies, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and UNC. No slackers here, either, and these schools combined account for another 84 students.

So now you're at 497, leaving only 138 to count. Quite a few of those are from top schools as well.

Yes, maybe 1/5 of the student body at Yale Law in 2018 came from less "fancy" schools, but in most of those cases we are talking about one student represented in all three classes (not one in each class). There are exceptions, to be sure -- BYU had 5, DePaul had 3, and a few less high regarded big state schools had a couple each.

So it seems to me that the Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools, and that what you say is fact is closer to fiction.

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

You just spent a lot of time not responding to what I said. "The Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools", as you say, because there are a ridiculously higher number of qualified applicants at those highly regarded schools, not because those schools are highly regarded.

That’s a theory not a fact

One half of Yale Law school are Ivy + Stanford graduates. One half. One quarter went to Yale or Harvard alone. But, ok, sure -- that doesn't mean Yale leans heavily in favor of these schools. Ok.

[Anonymous]

OP you also need to consider what path your DC wants to take post law school. If it’s big law then undergrad may matter. Big law is heavily reliant on academic credentials. Every lawyer bio lists their undergrad school in addition to law school.

That said, I don’t think Bates v Wooster is very different in that regard. Many will have only a glancing knowledge of both.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP you also need to consider what path your DC wants to take post law school. If it’s big law then undergrad may matter. Big law is heavily reliant on academic credentials. Every lawyer bio lists their undergrad school in addition to law school.

That said, I don’t think Bates v Wooster is very different in that regard. Many will have only a glancing knowledge of both.

As those of us who have worked in BigLaw repeatedly point out in this thread, undergrad does not matter in BigLaw. Law school matters. (I ran a summer associate program, hiring almost exclusively from T14. We had people who attended undergrad everywhere from Berkeley to Iowa to DePaul.)

Zero difference between Bates and Wooster.

[Anonymous]

^Sorry, I meant zero difference between Bates and Wooster for the purpose of law school admission and law practice.